This article is a preview from the Winter 2019 edition of New Humanist
It was only as we arrived at the Abbey Theatre that I heard about Gordon’s affliction. “He loves going to the theatre,” his wife confided as we were shown to our seats. “But he has this small problem. As soon as the curtain rises, he falls fast asleep. Just like that.”
As the first act of an adaptation of Henry James’s Washington Square unrolled, I glanced along the row and saw that Gordon was indeed fast asleep. It was hardly the first time I’d seen a dozing theatregoer, but in this instance it was alarming. One of our party was friends with the play’s director and had secured us an invitation to go backstage and meet some of the cast during the first interval.
We duly trooped behind the scenes and within minutes found ourselves shaking hands with the director. “How did you enjoy the first act?” he asked. “It was really very good. Very good indeed,” we murmured in turn. Only Gordon remained silent. Silent enough to attract the director’s attention. “And you enjoyed it too?” he asked.
“I fell asleep,” he said. “Nothing to do with your play,” he added briskly as though this would get him off the hook.
“But surely,” said the director, “that means you will no longer be able to follow the plot?”
“There is that,” Gordon cheerily admitted. “But there is an upside. While everyone else in the theatre is wondering what is going to happen, I’m busy wondering what has already happened. It adds to the suspense.”
It was, it transpired, a complete fabrication. Although Gordon remained awake for the second act, as soon as the curtain rose on the final scenes he once again fell into an all too evident slumber.
“Has he ever been diagnosed as narcoleptic?” I asked his wife.
“Oh no,” she said. “He simply doesn’t like plots. And in particular he dislikes endings. Sleep is his chosen device for avoiding both.”
I remembered Gordon as I settled down last week to catch up on some of the dozen or so dramas I’m currently watching on domestic television and Netflix and Prime Video and Sky Atlantic. There I was again being induced to wonder whether the slick detective was really the villain, whether the mutilated body in the woods would turn out to be the missing child, whether X or Y would succeed to the newspaper empire or whether the sexy waitress would finally break up the hero’s marriage.
What might my life be like if, in common with Gordon, I could free myself from this obsessive concern with what comes next? If I could somehow eschew beginnings and endings and settle for a place in the middle, a place that was determinedly here and now rather than “forthcoming” or “to be continued”?
It would take courage. I remembered reading a review of Rachel Cusk’s acclaimed novel Outline in which the writer travels to Athens to teach a creative writing workshop. She describes the flight, the apartment where she is staying and her conversations with those she encounters. “Nothing at all happens, apart from what happens,” wrote the reviewer. “There is nothing in this novel that might be analogous with ‘narrative tension’. There is no such thing as plot . . . You will exit the narrative in the same passive semi-enervated state in which you entered it.”
Passive? Semi-enervated? Might there be more positive ways of describing the reader’s condition? How about “freed from anxiety about the next development”?
“Worried about the latest Brexit news?” asked my partner a few evenings ago.
“Less and less,” I said, “now that I am finally escaping from the tyranny of the next thing.”
She’d heard me rehearsing this prospective liberation before but had ignored it through successive episodes of Dublin Murders, World at War and Game of Thrones. But it seemed there was a limit.
“There’s only one good reason why you now pontificate on the pleasures of abandoning outcomes,” she said. “Your own mortality has finally caught up with you. Nowadays any absurdity at all will suffice to disguise the prospect of your own ending. Shall I quote?”
“If you must.”
“‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said/ ‘And your hair has become very white/ ‘And yet you incessantly stand on your head/ ‘Do you think, at your age, it is right?’”
